The video game sector earns more than 160,000 million dollars a year worldwide. This is 60% more than what the film and music businesses make together. And the forced confinement due to the pandemic triggered its consumption even more, especially in the youngest (50% women, according to the European Commission). That is why it was not too much of a surprise that yesterday several students had to stay at the doors of the graduation hall of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Oviedo, given the enormous attendance that the conference “Animation and videogames in Asturias” registered, third delivery of the IX Edition “The Asturias that works”, which concludes tomorrow. The series is organized by LA NUEVA ESPAÑA and the University of Oviedo and is sponsored by Unicaja, in addition to the collaboration of the Principality Foreign Promotion Society (Asturex) and the Oviedo and Siero town councils.
The speakers at yesterday’s session were Raquel Santamaría, “coordination maganer” of Inovace, an interactive entertainment company from Oviedo; and Alejandro González, founder of the Milkstone video game studios, also from Oviedo. The meeting was moderated by Alan Wall, coordinator of the “Master in Economics. Instruments of Economic Analysis”.
Santamaría and González agreed that the pandemic has influenced their companies. Santamaría, whose business is largely based on organizing events, said the lockdowns “affected” business. “Many companies in our sector have not survived,” he lamented. However, he clarified that he is perceiving an upturn in attendance at virtual reality rooms, “since it is a product that not everyone has at home”, and confirmed the general “pull” of video games in these years. González pointed out that during the health crisis “the consumption and purchase of video games increased a lot.” “In fact, as mobility restrictions have been lifted, sales have dropped,” he admitted.
Santamaría’s company, Inovace, which is part of the No Group, uses the latest technological advances – especially virtual reality – to develop video games and offer immersive experiences in leisure centers and collective events, in collaboration with entertainment giants such as Marvel, Disney, HBO, Nickleodeon or Universal. The company is divided into four departments: “software”, which develops the group’s own web pages; “hardware”, in charge of logistics and technical deployment at events; creative engineering, which develops all physical technology; and “gaming”, responsible for video games and interactive graphics.
“We have invested heavily in virtual reality, we try to always introduce it in our events,” explained Santamaría, who gave some examples of recent campaigns: a Ninja Turtles experience in which the user seems to be walking on the rooftops of New York or a game in which competitors pretend to have the power of the “Jedis” from “Star Wars” to get hold of a can of Coca-Cola.
Inovace is currently preparing a virtual reality game about the Marvel character “Doctor Strange”, and has recently opened two innovation laboratories, called MadLab, in Lisbon and Portugal. And the company’s creations also look back in time: last year they achieved the Guinness record for the largest “arcade” machine in the world, with the legendary Tetris video game.
Try and failure
The story of Milkstone, the video game company founded in 2009 by Alejandro González and Miguel Herrero, is an example of the old trial and error formula. “We started in our spare time when we were interns at a company. Our first step was to join a Microsoft platform called Xbox Indie Games, where you could sell your games ‘online’ for the Xbox console. Today this is very common, especially everything with cell phones, but at that time it was very innovative,” said González.
That first experience worked, and in 2011 González and Herrero rented an office and began to dedicate themselves completely to Milkstone. Between 2009 and 2013, when Microsoft shut down the Xbox app, the company produced 26 games. The following year they were transferred to the Steam platform, a benchmark in the “online” sale of these products. “We already had more baggage, so we decided to do more serious things,” said González.
The first video game they sold on Steam was “Ziggurat”, a remarkable success with 900,000 copies sold. That encouraged them to a “pharaonic” project, never better said, in which they invested a lot of time and effort: “Pharaonic”, set in Ancient Egypt. But it flopped and only sold 30,000 copies. The thing improved with the following, “White Noise 2”, whose sales were around 450,000. And the great success of the company would come later with “Farm Together”: more than a million copies. “It’s our goose that lays the gold eggs,” defined González, who believes that the “luck factor” is more important than it seems: “There are games with a lot of promotion and a lot of development cost that don’t work.”
Both businessmen pointed out that Asturias offers possibilities for the future. According to González, “the video game sector is very global and hardly offers a barrier to entry: you can make a good product here and sell it to China. The only problem is that there is a lot of competition.” For his part, Santamaría stressed that his company has hired Asturian students who were on internships and who “proved to have a very good level.”